VOYEUR

This tutorial I wrote for Advanced Creation Magazine details several digital technics I use to create colored illustrations with a traditional drawing basis. As it includes a part of digital drawing so I highly recommend you to use a pen tablet. The 7 to 10 steps can be performed on a different order, even simultaneously, based on your intuition and your artistic sensibility.

For the base of this work I use a traditional drawing made with a mechanic HB pen and a 8B lead pencil on a A3 sheet of white paper.You can use any format, smaller or larger, depending on the amount of details you want to incorporate in your artwork.I advise you to contrast your drawing as much as possible, by using pencils with different degrees of hardness (HB to 6B for example) : This will avoid forcing contrasts in Photoshop, which could damage the graphite textures of your artwork.

Clean carefully the glass of your scanner using a cloth to remove impurities, it would end up in your illustration thereafter.If like me, your drawing is larger than the effective area of your scanner, scan the different parts of your drawing separately ( an A4 scanner may very well do the trick ).In this example I use an Epson Perfection V330 Photo scanner.Use an HD mode, it is essential to have the richest and most detailed document as possible.If your scanner is able to, I recommend generating .tiff files at 600dpi .

Once the high-definition scans is made ​, the first task at hand is to assemble them to reform the complete drawing .This step may prove to be a real headache , fortunately Photoshop provides us an automation tool perfectly suited to this task : Photo Merge .File> Automate> Photomerge. Choose Auto layout and clear "image fusion".You will get the reconstitution of the drawing from the different scans placed in separate layers.

Use layer masks to hide borders and to narrow the transition between the different parts.I set up my workspace by adding free space all around my drawing. My document at this stage is 8500px wide by 10 500px tall.

The scanning treatment often leaves pixel aberrations and a sort of unattractive grain on the image.After merging the different parts of my drawing (Cmd + E) , I apply a very light Gaussian blur over the entire image that will erase the impurities and aberrations before any setting operation.Filter> Blur > Gaussian Blur , Radius: 0.6 pixels.By retouching levels, curves or contrasts directly without performing this step, you take the risk of strengthening these imperfections generated by the scanner.

After this slight blurring , optimize your drawing contrasts with the levels (Cmd + L) and curves (Cmd + M). Make sure to keep a wide range of grays to preserve the textures and subtleties of traditional drawing.

When I work on this kind of colorization , I choose a very limited color range that combines a selection of cold colors ( here blue, purple and green ) and warm colors ( a palette of pink ) .The first step is to redefine the basic color range of my drawing because the deep true black weighed , freezes drawing and it forbids you to play with temperature within the image.I apply a gradient map on the drawing layer to redefine its chroma and temperature. In this example I selected a range of cool colors ranging from dark blue-green / mineral blue to white.Create a New Adjustment Layer > Gradient map and apply it only to the layer containing the drawing ( hold down the Alt key and click between the two layers) , and configure the colors of the gradient.

Using a pen tablet and the brush tool, I begin to lay the color zones making sure to separate colors on different layers configured with blending mode « multiply ».Separating the colors on layers makes it easy to try different combinations of colors and quickly refine your color chart and the overall feel of your artwork.For example you can change the hue and saturation (Cmd + U ), the blending mode or opacity of a color independently by targeting the corresponding layer.I begin with large areas and pale shades .

I continue to paint different areas ending with the finest and the most vivid color detail, always by superimposing layers set to multiply mode. In places the color layers overlap, this will create additional relief within the image.

On a new layer blending mode to "normal", I then add highlights. These are some light colored touches that clarify and strengthen some details of the design (contours of hands, eyes, bridge of the nose , outline of the tree trunks ).I use a brush with the powdery effect of hard pen or chalk to maintain consistency with the traditional drawing textures. For this, I set the brush size with a 4px radius ( variable depending on the size of the document ), a 60% step and a 580 % spreading controlled by the pen pressure.

At any time you can add details to your drawing directly in Photoshop to complete the traditional drawing.Here , I use my brush "chalk" configured in the previous step to add the ribbons on a new layer .

At the very end of the process, I finish with some accents of white ( reflections in the eyes for example) and some details in bright colors such as sketched pink and light green shapes. You can then adjust the global color balance and contrast by using dynamic adjustment layers until you obtain a satisfactory result.In this case, I simply made ​​the choice to reduce the saturation of my image using the invert filter set to 6 % opacity.